You’ve been planning everything for weeks, your campaigns achieved the desired results, the tickets on Eventbrite are sold out and the buffet you’ve organized could cause envy to a wedding caterer…good job, now you can settle back!
No, you can’t!
When you plan an event (for yourself or for one of your clients) you must be sure to never abandon it, on the contrary: you should ride the wave and create more engagement on your social channels.
Events are a powerful means of communication for companies and, if they are correctly integrated in a social media strategy, they can give you great satisfaction.
There are two main reasons not to miss this opportunity:
- You will allow the people that cannot come to your event to follow it remotely, sharing photos and videos, reporting the main sentences of speeches and posting brief summaries of what has been said during a workshop.
- You will be able to create more engagement among the people that are physically attending the event through mentions, special hashtags and interacting with the contents generated live by users.
How to get ready to deal with a social media live coverage in the best way? Here are some steps to follow:
1) First of all, consider the extent of the event, in order to understand if you will be able to follow it autonomously or you will need the help of a trusted colleague.
2) Reflect upon the best platforms to communicate about your event (Twitter? Facebook? Instagram Stories? Periscope?).
3) Choose a unique and easy to remember hashtag and spread it before and, above all, DURING the event, to make it easy to find the posts and tweets of participants. How? You can show it on a screen, ask the people that speaks into the microphone to remind it, attach it on the gadgets that you might distribute. Special trick: someone uses it as wifi password!
4) Be sure to be logged or to have the username and password of all the social channels where you want to tell about the event. This might seem to be a banal tip, but in the past I happened to have to follow several clients during the same event and to loose some access details.
5) Get informed about the nature of the event, about the themes that will be treated, and about the hosts that will speak, to prepare a list of their social media usernames and be able to tag them quickly on their channels (and to be sure non to run up against two names being the same, and…gaffes).
6) Interact with the contents generated by users, put likes, thank them, follow them and share their contents in order to create a stronger relationship with the audience in the room. You may also take into consideration the possibility to create a social media wall to show the nicest contests that participants are sharing to make other people want to participate, too. Two of the most famous tools are Walls.io or Taggbox.
7) Do you already know that there will be some high points? Write some draft posts, in this way you will not waste time finding what you should or should not write.
8) If you plan to make live videos, be sure to have a good connection, in order to avoid pixelated frames and, consequently, unpleasant reactions. You can test the wifi of the space or get a web pocket. Otherwise, a slight pre-recording, with quality videos, is preferable.
9) Be prepared for any accident! It might seem nonsense, I know that, but it is not rare that the battery of the computer or smartphone runs out faster than expected, or it might happen that there are no free sockets to recharge your devices. Powerbank & Co. can literally save you from a flop.
10) Once the event has ended, create an album with the photos of the event (consider also some backstage images!), tell about how it has gone and maintain the interest high also in the following days. If you want to dare, you might ask relators to be at disposal for other 24 hours for a Q&A session, perhaps opening a special Facebook group.
Is everything clear? Good, now you are ready for hectic live posting, being sure not to have left anything to improvisation!
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